Chapter Sixteen

Fifty thousand. A hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand. He had agonized about it. How much was enough, how much too much? If he asked for too much, the big man would never pay up. Of course he couldn’t simply afford to refuse – the picture was too clear for that – so he would pretend to pay up. And then kill him. If he asked for too little, it would hardly be worth risking his life for it. In the end he had settled for a hundred and fifty thousand. Chicken feed for the big man, surely. Not that he had asked for money yet. Let him sweat. With every piece of the photo, he must feel more threatened. A copy of this piece goes to the Herald. And of the next pieces. He’d be wanting to pay up. He’d be glad of the opportunity to pay up, to stop any more bits arriving. A hundred and fifty. It didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel enough. The price of half his eyesight, half his manhood. Not enough for what he’d had done to him, not enough for what he was. Perhaps not Spain. Too close to England? Or India. You could live like a prince out there. Too hot, perhaps. A hundred and fifty.

Now he worried about the size of it. What did a hundred and fifty in used notes look like? Tens and twenties. How big a bag would it be? How heavy? Yesterday he had taken a carrier bag of newspapers from a recycling bin up the road and brought it back here. He’d taken a pair of scissors to them and started cutting them into banknote-sized pieces. Until his thumb ached from closing the scissors. It seemed to take for ever. Eight thousand pieces of paper. They fitted into quite a small space. Nothing to worry about there. Now he worried about the bits of paper. How would he explain these? They were banknote-size, after all. Then he realized with relief that he didn’t have to explain them; no crime had been committed. He flung the wads into a bin liner with the content of his kitchen bin.

The next question, the big question, the all-important question, was: how. A question of life and death if ever there was one.

‘I still find it hard to get over this déjà vu date,’ McLusky said, sipping his coffee and wishing he could smoke. It was as if they had tried to re-create their last evening in the spring. Her fine blonde hair was still cut short, both wore the same clothes, though in McLusky’s case out of necessity rather than design, and both had chosen the same dishes.

Louise narrowed her eyes. ‘Here’s hoping it wasn’t tempting fate.’ They gently clinked coffee cups.

When the bill arrived, she made a grab for it. ‘I’ll pay.’

‘It should be me really. To make up for the debacle we had last time.’

Her eyebrows rose. ‘You think buying me a curry will make up for that? Think again.’

‘Well … I thought it could be a start.’

‘Start somewhere else. Anyway, I checked what freshly promoted detective inspectors earn, so I insist. You can buy me a drink down the road.’

‘Where?’

‘I fancy a snowy harbour scene.’

The Boat House was one of the new, busy and antiseptic bars that McLusky, had he been looking for a place to drink by himself, would have given a wide berth. He’d have preferred almost any old pub to this blond-wood and brushed-steel bar with its overlit reflective surfaces and carefully dressed clientele, despite the beautiful harbour-side setting. And he generally avoided bars that felt it necessary to employ bouncers at the door. Even though most of the drinkers were around his own age, he felt the absence of anyone over forty unnerving. It had been Louise’s choice of venue and she obviously felt comfortable here, even nodded at one or two people she recognized. They found seats, and McLusky forgave the place some of its glitz when he discovered Murphy’s on tap at the bar. Louise had decided to stick with white wine. The barman who served him looked so well-pressed and fresh-faced, McLusky felt tempted to ask if he was old enough to work there.

Louise, he now knew, was a couple of years older than him, and at work she was Dr Rennie. ‘So what are your own prospects, Doc?’ he asked, when he sat opposite her, sipping his drink too quickly. ‘If a detective inspector seems such a lowly occupation to you?’

‘I never said it was lowly, I merely remarked that it was not well paid, considering how unpleasant a job it is.’

So she had checked up on his spending power. It wasn’t something he would have thought of doing with her. He’d have simply asked. If he was interested. ‘I get by. And I never think of it as unpleasant.’

Rennie didn’t look convinced. ‘What about all those thoroughly nasty people you meet doing your job? That would put me off for a start.’

McLusky nodded as though agreeing. ‘I met you while doing my job, of course.’

‘A good point, Inspector.’

They bickered happily on until their drinks were finished. ‘Another?’ he asked, knowing what the answer would be.

‘Take me home, please. Let’s go find a taxi.’

‘We could walk to mine.’

‘Not unless you’ve had central heating installed.’

They passed the bar on the way out. Behind it, one of the barmen, the one who had served McLusky earlier, was being pushed roughly against the optics by a large man with a crew cut and a shiny leather jacket. He had grabbed the barman by the tie. It was difficult to hear what he was shouting at him, but he punctuated his argument by repeatedly slapping the barman’s face. The barman made no attempt to pull away, nor did the other two employees try to help him; they just glanced nervously over their shoulders while continuing to serve customers, who seemed not to notice.

McLusky squeezed Louise’s arm. ‘One minute?’ In ten seconds, he was behind the bar, stiff-arming leather jacket away from the barman.

The red-faced man turned on him. ‘What the fuck do you want here? Get the fuck out from behind the bar, pal.’

The man had a light Mediterranean accent; McLusky couldn’t place it. He showed him his ID. ‘Do you work here?’

‘I am part of management.’

‘I’m not impressed by your management skills.’ He turned to the barman, who looked pale, apart from his right cheek, which had lit up scarlet. ‘Are you okay? Do you want to make a complaint?’

The boy, still terrified, shook his head and withdrew. The part of management in the leather jacket squared up to McLusky. ‘Nobody called you, nobody complains. And I can smell you have been drinking. So perhaps you are off duty. You have no business here.’

Although he was far from being drunk, McLusky nevertheless knew that alcohol would come into it if this went official, so he decided to bluff. ‘Makes no difference. I don’t like the way you manage your staff. And I could easily make this my business. I could start by checking their work permits, and your own, working hours, the provenance of your vodka … It could get very tedious. Not for me, of course. I’ll just make one phone call.’

The man visibly deflated a little. Whether there was anything to hide or not, he probably understood the nuisance value of a narked police force. He shrugged, adjusted his leather jacket. ‘No problems. All over. You and your lady were leaving.’

They did. Rennie’s mood had changed. ‘You were doing so well until then. No police radio, your mobile didn’t go off once. It was almost like a normal date. But you couldn’t walk past that.’

It hadn’t been a question. He answered it anyway. ‘No, I couldn’t.’

‘So that’s what it’s going to be like?’

‘Of course not. Sometimes I get through a whole evening without arresting anyone.’

They were lucky with a taxi from St Augustine’s Parade. McLusky was glad. Rennie’s mood seemed to have nosedived after what she called his ‘performance’ at the bar, and he had never been good at placating women, despite having considerable practice at it.

The streets in the centre were well gritted, and no new snow had fallen for a while. A good-natured snowball fight was in progress in Park Street, where two groups of revellers exchanged missiles from one side of the road to the other, scraping snow off the roofs of cars and sniping from behind them. A snowball splattered against the driver’s window of their taxi; the driver grumbled to himself, not amused. It was a short ride to Clifton Village. A tourist guide would have described the area as affluent, upmarket, even exclusive. Its mainly Georgian architecture certainly made it stand out from all other districts, but it had other reasons, too, for feeling superior to the rest of Bristol: Clifton was older than the city itself. McLusky paid off the cab outside the large Georgian townhouse where Louise owned a first-floor flat.

It was immaculate. The sitting room had high windows, shuttered now against the night. She started the music system with one remote control, the coal-effect gas fire in the grate with another. A pair of cream two-seater sofas faced each other across an oriental coffee table. The wall opposite the windows was lined with books. The place suited its owner; McLusky told her he thought so.

‘I fell in love with it. It doesn’t have any famous views, or even decent views, but I wouldn’t have been able to afford it if it did. And the Primrose Café is practically around the corner.’

McLusky didn’t have time to wonder if they were going to have to talk house prices. She swiftly changed the subject and concentrated instead on showing him some ways in which he could make up for last time. They spent hours in front of the fire before shifting camp to the bedroom.

When McLusky woke in the morning, he didn’t need any time to remember where he was; he hadn’t been asleep that long. He shot a quick glance at the clock on the bedside table – it was seven exactly – and relaxed again. What had woken him was the clattering of crockery on the tray Louise had set down on the bed next to him. A cafetière of coffee, glasses of orange juice, and blueberry pancakes with snowy dollops of crème fraiche, dusted with cinnamon. Louise in her black dressing gown was fresh from the shower, her hair still damp. He reached up and kissed her, but she soon pulled away and poured coffee. ‘I hate cold pancakes.’

He sat up, examined the array on the tray. ‘Pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast. I could get used to that.’

‘Well don’t. I usually do the domestic-goddess thing just once. After that, it’s a bowl of Special K and juice from the carton in the fridge.’

‘Well that’s definitely another person,’ Warren said, peering through Ed’s magnifying glass. ‘But the face and the back of the head are missing. Crafty bugger. Look, the slice is even narrower than the other two.’

Ed grunted agreement. ‘And it doesn’t match up against the others. Mind you, sooner or later they’ll start knitting together. From the dimensions, I’d say there’s five more bits to it. Unless they get smaller and smaller.’

‘But why send it in bits in the first place?’

‘He said “why not print it anyway”. Are you going to wait until they’re all here? Why don’t we print them, slice by slice? Someone must recognize it.’

Warren was thoughtful. ‘Look at the way this is cut. The face is missing deliberately. So whoever is sending these must assume we’ll recognize the person. I don’t know, Ed. Something about these bits gives me the creeps. It’s the lighting, maybe. Or the graininess. And whoever is sending them has some sort of agenda of their own. I don’t like being used. There’s no way we can print it without seeing the whole picture, to coin a phrase.’

‘Shame. I fancied it as a puzzle. With a prize for the f rst one to get it.’

‘Yeah, I know the type of thing you mean. But we don’t need to use a creepy pic like this one.’ She stuck the three pieces on to the frame of her monitor. A moment later she unstuck them, laid them on the glass of the scanner and saved the image to her computer.

‘It’s bloody freezing.’ Despite wearing gloves, Sorbie’s fingers felt icy. He huddled deeper into the driver’s seat like a truculent teenager, barely able to see above the steering wheel. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. There wasn’t much to see anyway, only cramped little houses, uncollected rubbish and slush. It looked like home.

Fairfield didn’t bother acknowledging the sentiment, since Sorbie had said something to that effect a dozen times already since the beginning of their shift. She wasn’t exactly happy either. Just when the heating at Albany Road had been restored, they had business out here. And this was really a job for uniform. But the number of drug deaths continued to rise, albeit more slowly, which was why they found themselves sitting in Sorbie’s Golf, parked up in a drab street in Whitehall, watching a public phone box. Fairfield knew street dealers were operating around here. The phone box was often used to order up a drop of drugs. The area hadn’t recently been targeted by the drug squad, meaning things would hopefully be nice and relaxed. The idea was to catch some small-fry dealer and scare him enough with a manslaughter charge for supplying contaminated heroin to make him reveal the source of the stuff. In a city this size, they’d be extremely lucky to catch the contaminated heroin being dealt, but one addict had died in Whitehall, one in neighbouring St George in the last week. This was the right area.

They’d been to a pub at lunchtime, to get something warm to eat and to fortify themselves, Fairfield with a large glass of acidic red wine, Sorbie with a pint of industrial cider. The cheering effect of both had now worn off, making them ir ritable. Sorbie wished he had used the toilet before leaving the pub.

Since even a rattling drug addict would notice the clouds of hot exhaust from a car with its engine running, they sat in the unheated Golf. The temperature was near zero. After two hours, they had eventually pounced on one lot of likely candidates but had found nothing more than half an ounce of herbal on the supplier. Fairfield was so disgusted, she told Sorbie to let the lot of them go. They ran the engine of the car for fifteen minutes, shouting at the heater to hurry up, then waited once more. Another hour had passed since then. They had long run out of casual conversation. There were things Fairfield might want to talk about, but she wasn’t sure Sorbie was the right person, even though it was he who had made her think about it. A few days earlier, after the DS had gashed his leg trying to take a short cut through the window in Easton, they had driven to his house in Windmill Hill so he could clean up and change from his torn trousers. Sorbie lived in a narrow Victorian terrace not unlike the ones around here. She had never been there before. By the looks of it, he hadn’t got around to changing a thing since he moved in, apart from adding awkwardly parked IKEA furniture and a large TV. It looked like everything in the house had come flat-packed. While Sorbie got changed, Fairfield had taken a good look around downstairs. ‘You’re snooping in my cupboards,’ Sorbie had shouted from upstairs. ‘I can hear it!’ He hadn’t, but he knew Fairfield would be unable to resist. He was still convinced women only joined the force because they were basically nosy. It had been the freezer door Fairfield had opened first. She had counted three bags of frozen chips. The rest were burgers and sausages. The greasy chip pan on the electric stove showed every sign of being well used, as did the blackened non-stick frying pan in the sink. Next to the cooker on the pretend marble counter stood the largest bottle of ketchup she had ever seen; a squeezy bottle of American mustard was keeping it company. The kitchen window over the sink allowed a view of a narrow, empty garden. The recycling bins near the back door were overflowing with plastic cider bottles and beer cans, the only evidence that Sorbie had been here more than a week. Even the sitting room looked like he had only just moved in and hadn’t had time to create any kind of atmosphere, yet she knew he’d bought the house four years ago. Sorbie had never mentioned girlfriends, and by the looks of it, no woman had spent more than five minutes in this room. Or would have wanted to, unless her sole purpose was to sit on a sofa and look at a plasma screen.

Fairfield had heard through the station grapevine that DI McLusky lived in even less salubrious accommodation, over a shop, with second-hand furniture and no proper heating. She had been wondering since why so many officers seemed to lead marginal lives. And what they expected to get out of those lives. Of course there were plenty of happily married or hopefully engaged colleagues she could cite, but she suspected at least half of the team had put their social lives practically on hold, simply living from day to day, just treading water, as though waiting for something to happen, for something to enter their lives from the outside that would decide things for them. One day, when they weren’t working, she would ask Sorbie what he wanted out of life. Apart from getting promotion. And when he got it, would it make any difference to what he kept in his freezer? Or to anything else in his life outside of work, apart perhaps from his pension prospects?

Sitting in a freezing car, staring at a barely functional phone box, waiting to scoop up small-fry drug-dealers and their pathetic clientele was not what she should be doing at this stage in her career. Even the thought of returning to her warm office and her cappuccino maker failed to cheer her. It wasn’t really the cold that affected her; it was the endless hours of darkness that got her down. It made everything else weigh heavier, look dingier, feel harsher than necessary. How did people up in the north of Scotland cope, or the Orkneys even? But then, of course, they’d have the compensation of all that extra daylight in the summer.

Summer. She wanted to be teleported back to long, light, balmy evenings, spent at home in the communal gardens behind her house with a book and a glass of wine. How many of those evenings had she managed to enjoy this year? She couldn’t remember more than two. Not much to show for a whole year of work if that was your idea of reward.

Her radio came to life and she answered it.

‘We have a drug death reported in your area; officers attending suspect a heroin overdose. You said you wanted to know. The suspicion is that it’s pure heroin again.’

Fairfield tried to summon up some enthusiasm. ‘Yes, thanks.’

‘There is a witness who’s given a description of the person she thinks is the supplier.’

She sat up straighter. ‘Are they still at the address?’

‘She’s been detained for the purpose of a drugs search.’

‘Albany Road?’ Control confirmed it. ‘Thanks, control.’ She elbowed Sorbie into action. ‘Jack? Home!’

Snowing again, bloo-dy hell. Where did it all come from? Who needed it? Still, not quite as depressing as rain would be, but look at it: wind and ice and snow and slush. The real problem was that the few decent clothes she had were summer clothes. It had been warm enough at the pub, but she now had to stagger home for miles with no money for a taxi. All because Ali insisted she meet her halfway, so they’d ended up at the Old Fish Market. A bit too glossy for her. She’d rather have gone to a local pub and Ali could have kipped at her place, now that Gary was gone. Hurrah hurrah hurrah.

With all the layers she had on over her dress and her old clompy boots, she looked like a frump. And winter had only just started, yuck. Soon, though, she might have enough money for taxis. Well, not to take them everywhere, natch, but to get home after a night out. And she might get more nights out too, because – ta-daa – she had found a job. A shit job, Ali had called it. Ha-ha. Not because it was crap, though she hadn’t started it yet; could still turn out to be crap. Laboratory technician. At the Bristol Royal Infirmary. They were paying her while she was training, how good was that. Yeah, to look at poo, Ali had said. It wouldn’t all be poo. Yeah, some of it’s going to be piss, Ali had said. Well, she’d get used to it. Otherwise she’d wear a clothes peg on her nose, there, sorted. Whoops, bloody icy here, she thought they’d gritted all that. Because that was what it was all in aid of, celebrating getting a shit job and getting rid of a shit boyfriend. A double celebration. After four months of Gary-the-dickhead cluttering up her flat, not even looking for a job, and her being jobless herself for over a year. At least she’d gone out looking, and found stuff to do outside the flat, while he had basically set up camp in front of the telly. Watching crap or playing martial arts games on his Xbox. She hated that Xbox, it was so pointless.

She crossed the street. Short cut between the houses here. She shouldn’t go through little alleys like this, not alone, not at night, but it saved time and she was freezing her butt off, woolly tights or no. Anyway, her own neighbourhood. Where could you walk and feel safe? If she hadn’t given Gary the push, he’d have kept sitting there and started spending her money. The money from the poo job.

Nearly home. Starting Monday. Not that it was much money while she was being trained, but hey, it was more than the dole, and training was only three months, and after that it went up a bit immediately … Bloody hell, what a way to park a van, halfway across the pavement. Whoever did that was either drunk or else had no consideration for others. Thanks a bunch.

She was too surprised to scream. The side door of the van slid open next to her; a hand shot out and dragged her inside by the hair. A punch to the stomach winded her, made her want to throw up. The door slammed shut behind her. She was on the floor; he forced sticky tape across her mouth, and then it went dark and she couldn’t breathe. There was a bag over her head. The van was moving, driving away, driving her into the darkness. And no one had seen. No one. I bet no one saw a fucking thing.

Denkhaus promised he would keep the case conference short but not sweet. He congratulated the team on being the only one in the building where no officer was off sick with the dreaded lurgy. Austin supplied an explosive sneeze at that precise moment, drawing laughter even from the super. A couple of civilian operators still hadn’t returned to work, but Denkhaus appeared not to count them in. That was all the congratulations they were going to get. No real progress had been made, no arrests, no suspects, even.

It was the MO that set the Leigh Woods murders apart from all the drugs violence dealt out in the city, before and since Fenton’s conviction.

‘Could it be revenge of some sort? Could Fenton be directing it from inside?’ DS French wondered.

Fenton was presently doing time at Whitemoor, a Category A prison in Cambridgeshire. ‘He’s being closely monitored. Three of his associates are also doing time, all are in different prisons. We’re not giving him the chance,’ Denkhaus said. ‘Donald Bice was of course an ex-associate, though we couldn’t prove his direct involvement. But Deeming was just a small-time dealer. We never connected him with Fenton before. And Fenton had different methods. We may not have managed to connect him to any murders, but three Yardies disappeared, and the general opinion is that it was Fenton who disappeared them.’

‘Yes,’ McLusky agreed. ‘And they stayed disappeared, which is usually what happens. Someone disappearing is a lot scarier for your adversaries than finding them dead. It has that added spookiness that makes you feel unsafe.’

‘Indeed,’ Denkhaus went on. ‘The power to make you disappear without trace is more feared than any drive-by shooting.’

‘The thought had struck me before. The bodies were hidden, but really not very well. The graves simply weren’t deep enough. Both Deeming and Bice were killed slowly. They took their time killing them, but then hurried the burial.’

‘All that means is that they prefer murdering to digging holes,’ Denkhaus said. ‘Shame it doesn’t get us very far.’ McLusky hoped it might, but having nothing more than a vague feeling about it made no comment. Denkhaus went on: ‘Moving on to the cycle-path murder …’ He reached behind him to tap against Mike Oatley’s reconstructed photo on the picture board. ‘We’re still no further. We don’t even know where he was murdered, and forensics are dragging their feet in the snow.’

‘House-to-house enquiries came up with nothing,’ French supplied. ‘We spoke to everyone we could find who uses that stretch of the river, and everyone on this side of the river. We posted incident boards at both ends of the deposition site. Plus your own appeal for info on Points West two days ago. Nothing useful so far.’ In fact Denkhaus had done appeals on two local TV news programmes, as well as Radio Bristol. He enjoyed it and he was good at it.

‘Right, we need to dig further into Oatley’s background, his activities. Interview the social worker again. Anyone in his building friendly with him?’

‘Only friendly enough to go through his flat when the door was left open and make off with whatever they fancied.’

When the meeting broke up, McLusky, instead of turning left towards his cubbyhole office, turned right along the corridor to the CID room in order to make himself some coffee with the help of the reinstated kettle. The steam of his own little kettle inside the bottom compartment of his desk had managed to warp the wood to such an extent that the door now refused to open. It had trapped his coffee mug inside and, tragically, also held the bottle of Glenmorangie hostage. There were no spare mugs to be had in the CID room, so he clattered downstairs to the canteen. He bought a clingfilm-wrapped chocolate brownie, and while he paid for it with one hand, he stole one of the canteen mugs from the counter with the other.

‘Hey, I saw that,’ said the girl who gave him change.

‘Someone will be along later to take a statement,’ he promised and made off with it.

Back in his office, he stared down glumly at a mug of instant that had brown bits of undissolved granules and white bits of undissolved whitener floating on top. ‘Looks more like soup,’ he told Austin. ‘You’d get better coffee on a building site, I’m sure.’ He suddenly felt a stab of nostalgia for the freshly roasted coffee Fishlock had served him in his caravan, out in the clean woodland air. He opened the window behind him and lit a cigarette from his pack of Extra Mild. ‘How’s the no-smoking going, Jane?’

‘Better if I don’t talk about it. Or breathe yours.’

‘Did you find out what Donald Bice was living off since he stopped skippering for Fenton?’

‘Yeah, he’d been claiming unemployment benefit since the trial.’

‘No way. He had a freezer full of high-end ready meals and a leg of lamb and other stuff, and a couple of bottles of bubbly in the fridge. He wasn’t going to toast the arrival of his dole cheque with it. What’s the status of the flat?’

‘Mortgaged and in the name of the son.’

‘And the holy ghost. Bank accounts?’

‘They haven’t sent the details yet, but the man Deedee talked to told him there were no significant outgoings apart from a few credit-card transactions at petrol stations and a couple of standing orders. Credit activities ceased around the time of his death. Looks like Coulthart’s estimate was spot on.’

‘Bice must have had some other income. And it would have been cash.’

‘The stuff in the freezer could all be left over from when he still worked for Fenton.’

‘True. I didn’t check the use-by date on the ready meals. Should have done. If he bought them when he was still working, then they’d be out of date now. But then again, if he lived on benefits, he’d have eaten them by now. Surely. No, it stinks,’ McLusky decided. ‘So no transactions apart from petrol stations … what car did he drive?’

‘VW Passat.’

‘How sensible. And presumably nothing interesting turned up in there either?’

Austin shuffled a few papers in the file. ‘Erm, no, since, erm, we never found the car.’

‘What?’

Austin looked apologetic, though he didn’t know what he was apologizing about, he was sure. It hadn’t been his case and Bice had been considered a minor figure, a sideshow. ‘I’ve no idea why his car never figured back then, I suppose they had everything they wanted and the main man was Fenton, after all. We’re looking for it now, of course.’

‘I should think so. Are there garages at his place?’

‘No, dedicated parking spaces.’

His phone rang and he snatched it up. ‘McLusky.’

It was DC Dearlove. ‘Donald Bice had a regular cleaner. She does several flats in the building. She’s there now.’

A small metal disc nailed to a wooden post and rammed into a narrow bed of struggling vegetation proclaimed that the parking space belonged to Flat 5, which was Bice’s, or rather his son’s, as McLusky reminded himself when he parked the Mazda there. He rode the lift up to Flat 3, even though it was on the first floor. There’d been quite enough walking recently, for his taste. The door was answered by an attractive woman in her early thirties. She wore a grey tracksuit, a white T-shirt and white training shoes, and had her hair tied in a ponytail. Tiny studs sparkled in her ear lobes. In the background he could hear classical music, something he recognized but couldn’t place. ‘I’m looking for Julie Milne.’

‘You found her,’ she said, when he showed his ID.

‘You’re Julie Milne? Sorry. It’s just you don’t look like my idea of a cleaner.’

‘Who did you expect, Mrs Mop? Come in if you must, but take your shoes off. Unless you have smelly socks like the PC who was here earlier, then I’d rather you stayed in the hall. With your shoes on. I don’t want you transferring odours into the carpets.’

‘You’re certainly looking after your client’s property.’

‘They pay me a lot of money for it and I do it well.’

‘I know,’ said McLusky, now shoeless and relieved to see no holes in his socks. ‘I’ve admired your work upstairs, in Mr Bice’s flat.’

‘Yes, I do that. It’s what you’ve come about, is it? Shame about Donald. Shocking, really. He was okay, and I like the place.’

‘Easy to clean?’

She managed a smile. ‘Yeah, that too.’

Flat 3 could not have been more different to the flat of the same layout above. Floral upholstery on a traditional three-piece suite matched the rest of the dark-wood furniture and dark-red carpet. Here, combing straight the tassels on the Persian rugs and runners alone had to consume masses of time. Ornaments abounded.

Julie Milne crossed to the hi-fi and turned off the CD. ‘So what can you ask me that the other officer didn’t?’

‘You said shame about Donald. How well did you know him?’

‘Not well. He was pleasant, that’s all I meant. Not all my clients are; some are never satisfied or want you to do the impossible but not pay for the hours. That sort of thing.’

‘Yes, you get people like that in policing.’

‘I’ve been cleaning his flat and all the time he was dead. And I had no idea.’

‘You must have noticed the place wasn’t being used.’

‘Of course. But it still needed cleaning; dust still falls, and actually it’s a good opportunity to get things done you normally have to put off to clean up the mess your clients make.’

‘I thought most people cleaned up the day before the cleaner comes, out of embarrassment. It hadn’t worried you that your employer didn’t seem to be using the flat?’

‘He wasn’t my employer, he was a client. But no, not at all. He’s often away; was, I should say. Captaining yachts. Though not so much recently.’

McLusky picked up a figurine from a group of china ornaments on a shelf and sensed Julie Milne tensing. He pretended to examine the maker’s stamp, then set it back on the shelf, not quite where it had been. ‘So it was you who cleaned out the fridge.’

‘Yeah. Not that there was so much, but I chucked all of that last time I cleaned.’

‘How long have you worked for him?’

‘A couple of years.’

‘Did you notice any change recently?’

She briefly considered this while lifting her eyes to a gilt-framed reproduction of The Hay Wain above the fireplace. ‘Not really. You mean in himself?’

McLusky ran a finger over a high shelf, then inspected it as though checking for dust. ‘Anything.’

‘Well, he spent more time at home than he used to. And I think he had more money.’

‘More money? What makes you say that?’

‘I don’t know. He spent more on food and drank posher wines, that sort of thing. Not really top-end wines, but mid-range, I’d say.’

‘You know your wine, then?’

‘You’d be surprised what you can learn from other people’s kitchens.’

McLusky thought that, being a police officer, he probably wouldn’t be, but kept that to himself. He crossed the room to the balcony door, which gave a view very similar to the one upstairs, only the sea appeared more distant today. He could see his own car parked below, the road and the nearby industrial estate, and a few buildings of the same development. ‘Did he always park his car in the car park?’

‘Yes, mostly.’

‘Mostly.’

She joined him by the window. In her trainers she was nearly as tall as McLusky in his stockinged feet. ‘Well, yeah. He’s got his own space, erm … on the left somewhere.’

‘I know, I’m parked in it. You said mostly.’

‘Yes. Only I did notice that a couple of times he was here but his car wasn’t. And once I saw him drive out of the parking lot and turn right instead of left. Then half an hour or so later he came back without his car. On foot.’

‘Where does that lead to? When you turn right?’

‘Well nowhere, that’s the thing. It’s just the industrial estate, but the back of it. The front entrance is on the main road on the other side. The rest is just waste ground back there; they’re thinking of developing that as well. Same as this, I think.’

‘Right.’ He was already on his way back towards the hall, where he had parked his boots. ‘Do you have any police officers as your clients?’

‘No, why?’

‘I was just wondering if I could afford your services.’

While he struggled into his boots, she bent over a handbag on the hall table and produced a card. Prestige Domestic Services. Daily, weekly, monthly, one-off cleaning. She handed it over once he was booted. ‘Where is your home?’

‘Montpelier.’

‘That’s quite far. Not really worth my while travelling all the way there unless it’s a big job. It’s the petrol cost.’

‘Thanks, anyway.’ With any luck, Julie Milne had already made it worth his while travelling all the way here.

The lift was busy; he took the stairs. Fine snow was dancing in the air outside as he pulled out of the car park and turned right.